In the early days of automotive vehicles the seats provided little comfort to the vehicle occupant. Early vehicle seat backs, in fact, did not use seat springs, but instead were only piled material (such as horse hair) on a wooden frame covered with leather. Later seat backs used springs, but for many years only the seat style and type of covering material changed, with coil springs being used in automotive applications.
In response to the desire by consumers for more comfortable seating, automotive manufacturers provided additional padding to vehicle seats (particularly seat backs), thus seats became increasingly thick. While perhaps providing some response to the needs of consumers the heavily padded vehicle seats tended to be heavy and thus compromised efforts at overall vehicle weight reduction to improve fuel economy.
Current approaches to vehicle seat construction move away from the heavily padded seat backs to thinner seat backs. When thin seat backs are fashioned the resulting article is too firm. Accordingly a challenge facing designers and manufacturers is to provide a thin seat back that is comfortable for the occupant when the seat is in ordinary use. However, this same seat must be strong enough for the seat back to support a load when the seat back is folded flat against the seat base, thus creating another challenge to designers.
Accordingly, a need exists today for an improved system for providing a vehicle seat back which overcomes the known deficiencies of current thin seat back technology.